It’s a familiar story: We’re spending ourselves broke, to China’s benefit. Americans are addicted to the low prices afforded by Foxconn factories from Shenzhen to Wuhan. We’ve outsourced our jobs, hollowed out our manufacturing sector, and put the squeeze on the American workers whose consumption drives our economy.
There’s some truth in that fear. But it misses a much bigger issue: that the emerging Chinese middle class will soon outstrip America’s by several multiples. The good news is that affluent Chinese would love to spend money in America. The bad news is that we’re not making it easy. When it comes to China, tourism may be the biggest opportunity America is blowing: economically, politically, and geo-strategically.
The emergence of more than 1 billion Chinese into the global middle class over the next few decades will be the driving cultural force of the 21st century, and it’s hard to understate the importance of tourism in that equation. The tourism industry employed 266 million people and earned $7 trillion in 2013, accounting for 9.5 percent of the world’s economy and 9 percent of its workforce. Chinese tourists took 83 million trips in 2012 and spent $102 billion overseas (up 40 percent from 2011), making China the largest source of tourists worldwide. But that number pales in comparison to tourism within China: Business trips and spending alone exceeded $200 billion in 2013, up 14 percent year over year. China’s business travel market—hotels, airports, rental cars, etc.—will overtake America’s by 2016, and China will be the world’s largest overall tourist economy by 2027.
Read full story at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/04/chinese_tourism_to_u_s_america_is
_passing_up_a_big_opportunity.html
